Taking things to the next level with Workfront

[KarenRu]

Hello Everyone, Well it's time to take things to the next level w/Workfront- we're going to bring on 3 additional departments w/in my division this year. My department, creative services, was the pilot group to use Workfront. When we were configuring the instance, it was a bit overwhelming to try to configure in a way that was universal to the entire division because you don't know what you don't know at the beginning, and we were just trying to get our own MVP up and running. So- it's now time to take a step back and revisit all the decisions we made during our configuration and the setup. My question is to those of you who are admins and have been involved with enterprise wide rollouts- any helpful hints, things to consider, etc, etc? We have a WF value engineer coming to see us next week to help formulate a plan. Some general questions: How many departments are in your instance? To get an idea of scale, I can imagine the instance getting really complicated really fast- do you have a naming convention that you follow to keep track of everything? i.e- department initials after everything? And just to give me a frame of reference on what to expect- how many custom forms, data fields, reports, and templates do you have in your instance? Karen Rutz Harvard Alumni Affairs and Development

[VicAl]

By customer fields are you referring to custom fields you create in WF yourself? If so, yes, we are able to change those through the API. You have to preface them with a DE: in order for the system to recognize them. So if I created a field called Customer Phone Number in Workfront. In order to reference and/or change that field I would have to use DE:Customer Phone Number Not sure if that was the problem you were seeing, but thought I'd throw that out just in case. Vic Alejandro, PMP, CSM | IT | Sr. IT Project Manager Denver Water | t: (303-628-7262) | c: (303-319-6473) "http://www.denverwater.org/"> http://www.denverwater.org INTEGRITY | VISION | PASSION | EXCELLENCE | RESPECT

[melindal3825541]

A lot of great points in bringing Workfront to enterprise class implementations. Governance is key, tagging reports, forms and users appropriately is a necessity. Another key is to get the sharing right, if your sharing is too open users will have to wade through a lot of non-pertinent information. If you lock down sharing too much your team will spend a lot of time asking for access. Both sides can cause that frustration that leads users to dismiss a system. Since requests are often an early access point, I set most queues as visible only with view access to a project as this gives you the most control of access. I love using layouts to push on-object dashboards to focus the UI for each type of user in the system. This allows you to combine system fields and custom fields with conditional formatting to control how users interact with the system. CapabilitySource is a great group that is using Workfront as a tool in the complete process of working with marketing and compliance organizations to analyze their current processes and design TO-BE processes before starting implementation. Switching to a new tool is a great time to evaluate what you are doing and why. But every organization needs to stand back periodically and re-evaluate the why behind how you work. We've also developed a suite of tools called CapabilitySource Connect that fill in some of the gaps in Workfront in large implementations using the API. My favorite is the campaign builder, this uses a custom form to gather the campaign information and can assemble multiple templates to build out a complete marketing campaign with proper team assignments and all of the optional tasks included/excluded as indicated. There are also tools to generate sequential reference numbers, maintain a campaign hierarchy at the project level, create design and report folder structures and assign users to projects based on multiple attributes. And most of this is run from tabs within Workfront so your users don't know that you are extending the base capabilities. And then we have compliance customers that are taking API to whole new levels with our help. One of the great things about Workfront is that it's a very flexible tools. One of the frustrating things about Workfront is that it's a very flexible tool. Spend the time, consider a strategic partner and this tool can sing in an enterprise. -- Melinda Layten, Senior Consultant Work Management Improvement CapabilitySource Phone: (484) 505-6855 site: www.capabilitysource.com email: melinda.layten@capabilitysource.com - we simplify your work so you can run your business -

[VicAl]

Yeah if they have the recordings from Leap last year posted, it'll be in there. I never checked to see if they posted everything. The session was called - How to Automate Business Processes Using the Workfront API But I'm happy to do a Webinar or just chat individually with folks. Vic Alejandro, PMP, CSM | IT | Sr. IT Project Manager Denver Water | t: (303-628-7262) | c: (303-319-6473) "http://www.denverwater.org/"> http://www.denverwater.org INTEGRITY | VISION | PASSION | EXCELLENCE | RESPECT

[VicAl]

Nice! We're doing some similar things with surveys and HTML emails, etc. including looking to send timesheet data to an application called Maximo. Cool stuff. Vic Alejandro, PMP, CSM | IT | Sr. IT Project Manager Denver Water | t: (303-628-7262) | c: (303-319-6473) "http://www.denverwater.org/"> http://www.denverwater.org INTEGRITY | VISION | PASSION | EXCELLENCE | RESPECT

[BenettaPe]

Polly, I have no coding experience. I am a project manger/system administrator, with no development skills. Oh well. Thanks. Benetta Perry APS

[ScottSa1]

I'll have to check it out. I have no idea why I would have missed this because this is the exact stuff I wanted to learn about at leap last year! Thanks Scott

[DavidCo3]

Hi Polly, With Azuqua it is really up to you whether you use it with one or more applications. If you like, you can take data from Workfront, manipulate it, then write it back into Workfront again. There's all sorts of actions you can do on the data in the middle (calculations, text string conversions, mapping, logic tests etc). For each application such as Workfront, Azuqua has a set of defined actions which they have pre-coded for you as Action Cards (e.g. read an object, update an object, search for an object). You can also monitor for new/changed objects and also for changes to certain fields. Something I've started doing recently is writing my own API queries and using an HTTP GET card in Azuqua. This let's me do anything that Workfront's API supports and returns the data as a JSON object. It takes a little learning how to work with JSON but it is worth it, and really useful even if you just stick with using regular Azuqua cards. Writing Your Own queries can also let you reference several related objects deep, all in the one query. E.g. getting a task's project's currency rate, and getting all the fields from a task's assigned user's home group. I'm a big fan and could talk all day. Let me know if any further queries. David Cornwell Pentana Solutions

[pco88]

Interesting. I see it as a very good option for integration between two applications. In our case, we don't need integration between 2 apps just yet and data manipulation is all what we'd like to do which can be met by some API scripts. I just wish WF would provide hosting for custom applications. "https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115003986853-Provide-hosting-platform-for-custom-applications">https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115003986853-Provide-hosting-platform-for-cus... Polly Co

[SherriKn]

@karen rutz Great thread! Thanks for starting it. We are in a very similar situation in our implementation and in how we work... We're doing a "health check" with a Workfront rep in August for this very reason. We do have projects where the creative team creates the email and the list selection is managed by another team in IT. We route email jobs through 2 separate intake staff to sign staff from two teams. That may not be ideal, but keeping ONE project for the list and the email design is a big help to have it all together. Best, Sherri Knieriem IU Foundation